Short story is this.  I had some serious hard drive problems, I seem to have most of that resolved now, but now I have a lot of files that have . in front of the file name and .asdfokex at the end of them.

 

for example movie .name.mkv.2lkxvels

 

I believe the . at the beginning means it's hidden

 

I suspect these are files that were in the process of being moved when bad things happen.

 

Regardless of how it happened, how do I find and eliminate all these files, which are spread all over my folders on several hard drives?

You can find them using find, similiar to:

 

find /mnt/user/ -name ".*" -print

 

In theory, you can use:

 

find /mnt/user/ -name ".*" -exec rm {} \;

 

I am always a bit worried about mass delete scripts, so i might just build a file of rm commands so I can verify what is happening.  From a shell:

 

 

find /mnt/user/ -name ".*" -print |

while read x

do

    echo "rm ${x}" >> mydeletefiles

done

 

Then your mydeletefiles will just be alot of rm (delete commands) you can verify and then run if you are happy with the list...

 

 

Finally had a chance to work on this.  Your idea worked great.  There were less than I feared, so I was able to delete them manually without too much trouble.

 

thanks again!